Shabby Chic Back to School – Vintage School Desk Makeover

Vintage Shabby Chic School Desk Makeover

Vintage School Desk Commission for a Shabby Chic Makeover

We, as parents, are all relieved with a new school year beginning. Children, on the other hand, are not happy at all. Perhaps it is a good idea to sparkle their life with a Shabby Chic bits of their own history? Such an idea got to us a customer with old, rusty, old-fashioned school table – with a request for makeover for 11-year old daughter.

The desk was in possession of our customer’s father, he used it as a child, as well as our customer. Now was turn for the third generation, and we supposed to make it possible. Have a look at the picture above to tell if we did it right.

1. Before

The desk was heavy used in the past, and had a full lot of cracks and scratches, a clear sign of booooooring lessons.

Some of the holes were quite deep, it had to take a lot of time and sacrifice to make them. Also, take note at the edges of desk’s cover – there is a lot of chipped bits.

Inner part was in reasonably good condition.

2. Restoration

We stripped the desk to the bare wood. It was not a big problem as there was no veneer there at all. All the cracks we filled with a heavy-duty wood filler.

One good thing about shabby chic makeover (when painting is involved) is that you can use nails – at the end of the day they will disappear under the layer of paint.

In this case we used small nails to fix a strip of wood for rebuilding damaged edge of the desk’s cover. The nails went as a support to polyurethane glue we used before.

Cracks inside, these ones between original panels, were also filled with thin straps of wood and fixed with a polyurethane glue.

3. After – Final Look

We were asked to give it more Chic than Shabby look. We chose Annie Sloan’s ‘Old White’ chalk paint protected with satin acrylic varnish.

Inside we painted with a bit darker colour, we used Annie Sloan’s ‘Duck Egg Blue’.

Have a look at the rest of images.

That was our first shabby chic makeover of a school desk.
I hope the third generation of its user will make successful come back to school.